


Waste

by Tofutti



Series: wish we were home now [2]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Tragedy, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Family Feels, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Letters, how Phil's view of L'manberg changes and why he does what he does, mostly? I guess?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-19 01:06:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29742630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tofutti/pseuds/Tofutti
Summary: L’Manberg was gone long before Philza killed it. He watched its birth through a flurry of letters in Wilbur’s careful scrawl, and no matter how much he wanted to hope that it could be repaired, he knew his son’s nation was doomed.(Philza and L’manberg, death by death.)
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Wilbur Soot & Phil Watson
Series: wish we were home now [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2184786
Kudos: 13





	Waste

**Author's Note:**

> This is a standalone fic, and you don't have to read anything else in this series to understand what's going on. 
> 
> Obligatory disclaimer: this not about the content creators themselves, but the characters they play on the SMP.

Phil hears about the war in a pair of letters home, both of them splotchy and rushed and scribbled in their own distinctive scrawls.

He sits himself down at his desk when the sun has dipped into the infinite distance beneath the horizon, slipping on his reading glasses. He’s got enough lantern oil to last him through writing a reply, he thinks. The light is gentle and flickering, and Phil smiles. This letter reading has become something of a nighttime ritual. There’s no telling when Wilbur and Tommy will write, but when they do, Phil sits down and reads it, line by line, careful and slow. This most recent envelope is thin; he slits open the top and pulls out two sheets. 

Laying the pages out on his desk, Phil sorts out Tommy’s spiky scribbles from Wilbur’s loopy scrawl. Tommy’s filled an entire page—which isn’t much, but it’s a lot for Tommy—and Phil goes to this first. He’s found it’s better to get the messy handwriting out of the way first before his eyes get blurry.

_ WE WON!  _ the letter screams at him in brittle capitals. Phil wouldn’t be surprised if the tip broke halfway through.  _ Dad, we won! We sent that green bastard packing!Holy shit I am so fucking happy rihgt now you have no idea, this blows though im stuck in bed and its fucking awful.  _

_ Wilbur wont let me up even though i’m fine and I told him so so I have to sit around all day and he said I should write a letter to you so thats what I’m doing. And its good to write a letter to you because everyone here already knows what happened, and I can’t keep telling them the same story, because they were there too. So I can tell you instead. _

_ Anyway so they tried to make us surrender or whatever—Gogy and Sapnap and the green bithc—I think Wilbur wrote you about that but I don’t knwo . so anyway of course we said no and then they got all mad. Tubbo did some smart things and he got his house burned down and then we started fighting. And then we were at L’manberg and Wilbur was super cool when he did this speech about Liberty over death. Prime, Wilbur is so fucking cool. Anyway, then things got bad because apparently Dream planted tnt. So the bitch sets it off and man, Phil, L’manberg just  _ goes.  _ We all had to get to the water and I got a sick burn on my arm and I swear it was like the ground was ripping itself up, except with fire. Then we went to my place and we had a bow fight—Phil, I shot them so many times, you have no idea—and we went up eret’s tower and shot them from above and they retreated. _

A few lines after that are scribbled over, blacked out with a jagged cloud of pencil. Phil doubts he could make out the text underneath even if he wanted to. 

_ We kinda won that battle,  _ the letter continues beneath, _ but Fundy got shot and Will was super upset. So instead of keeping risking our lives I challenged Dream to a duel like a badass. You should have seen me, Phil. I looked so cool. I shot that bastard in the face and I bet it hurt like hell and Dream said we could have freedom and now L’manberg is its own nation and you should have seen the look on Wilbur’s face, man. He looked so fucking happy, you wouldn’t believe it. We signed our independance and then I passed out and now I’m here. It’s fucking beatiful. And Will’s so proud. It’d be cool if you were here. You could sit with me in the van instead of ditching me like Wilbur did. Everyone’s been visiting me and stuff though so it doesn’t suck as much as it could, I guess. _

_ See you soon _

_ Big T _

Phil smooths out the letter and folds it in half, settling it against his desk with both hands. Pride and worry are welling in his chest in equal measure, and he takes a moment to sort through it. Tommy painted the picture of a perfect battle, but there’s probably something more to it. All he knows, though, is that Tommy passed out and Wilbur isn’t letting him out of bed. Despite the concerning picture that paints, he can’t hold back a grin. However proud Wilbur is of his nation, Phil is proud of him and Tommy tenfold. They’ve done more than he ever expected from them. He’s sure that whatever they’ve built is beautiful. 

Wilbur’s letter is shorter. A quick glance chalks its length up to responsibilities—he  _ had  _ just started a country—but it only reads:

_ Phil: _

_ I don’t know what Tommy wrote to you, but we won. I need to talk to you. I’ll be by in a few days. I know where you are. Please wait for me. _

No elaboration. No detailed outline of his victory. Just a quick note and a request to talk. Phil lifts his pen with a sense of sickened dread. To Tommy, he writes a quick response that he hopes is reassuring and funny and nice. To Wilbur, he only replies,  _ Hurry. _

Later, once Will has arrived, long after their tea has sat for too long and gone cold, Wilbur tells Phil everything else, about Eret and Tommy and death. He talks of TNT, of the waste his country was laid to. It only took a few days after to repair, but he described the sight as devastating, as though the chasm had opened in his chest itself, shattering earth and bones alike. 

The first time L’manberg dies, Phil isn’t there to see it. He wishes he was, if only to hold his son close and swaddle him in night-grey feathers all the sooner as everything collapsed around him. So instead, he holds Wilbur all the tighter. Wilbur smiles the same smile he’s always had. Phil says he’s proud. He is not a liar.

* * *

In October, it’s only Tommy who writes.

The last letter Phil received was mostly written in Wilbur’s neat print but peppered with notes from Tommy scrawled into the margins. It arrived in late September. 

Wilbur and Tommy lost the election, it said. JSchlatt won with a coalition government—technically legal, it said. Wilbur and Tommy are okay. They’ve found a new place to stay. Technoblade is on his way.

Phil is concerned, but not too much: his sons are stubborn. They’ll bounce back. He believes this less and less each week that passes without correspondence. 

So it’s with equal parts anxiety and relief that Phil sits down with Tommy’s letter that late October evening, and with shaking hands that he slits it open. A single paper, water stained in places, slides out. Phil lays it out on the desk and starts to read.

_ Hello phil _

_ I hate technobalde so fuckign much. He killed tubbo and it’s his fautl nad i fuckgin hat him and tubbo says he’s already forgiven him but I havent. Tubbo hasn’t slept a full night since the festival. He says its’ the scars bothering him but I know he has nightmares. He must not remember me waking him up.  _

_ Jschlatt is a bitch and that festival was the worst thing that has ever happened. I cant believe techno just listened to him like that. He blew him up, Phil! With fireworks!!! Fucking listened to j fuckign schlatt when he told him to execute him because he found out tubbo was a spy because apparently we didnt do a good enough job pretending and now tubbo died and its all technoblades fault _

_ Anyway we’re back in Pogtopia now and Tubbo and Niki are here which is good because apparently Schlatt’s been even worse than we’d heard. Fuck manberg. Fuck schlatt. fuck technoblade.  _

_ It’s kind of scary. Phil, I don’t know what to do.  _

_ Anyway I totally beat techno up after he killed tubbo. Tubbo said he didn’t want me to but I did anyway because no one gets away with something like that. Wilbur was egging me on but I didn’t do it for him, i did it for Tubbo. I’m telling you this because I don’t know what he’s written to you. It was so cool. _

_ Big T _

Phil finishes the letter with a sinking pit in his stomach. It feels like simmering death, nauseating and dark. He buries his face in his hands, leaning back in his chair. 

The thing is, each and every one of Wilbur and Tommy’s letters from the months they’ve been away sits in a chest by the side of his desk. A picture Tommy took of their ragtag group of revolutionaries hangs on his wall. There’s a flag, red and blue and white, pinned next to his window. He’s read everything Wilbur ever sent him, and Wilbur sent him a lot. From hopes and sketched-out plans in L’manberg’s early days, to every ideal he built the nation on, to the first draft of the country's anthem, Wilbur’s monthly letters illustrated to him the outline of his son’s heart. Phil doesn’t know JSchlatt, doesn’t know exactly what’s happening on the Dream SMP, but he knows that executing a sixteen-year-old is not what Wilbur built his country for. 

Even through a single page, Schlatt’s leadership sits like poison on Philza’s tongue—in the way Tommy talked about the festival, about Techno, about Wilbur himself. Phil is sickened, and he can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t just Tubbo who died a little bit. 

_ Do you want me to come? _ is Phil’s simple response.  _ I could probably figure out a way in _ . 

He waits for an answer, but Tommy never writes back.

* * *

L’manberg is a gasping, shuddering thing when Phil first sees it, blood pooling and trickling, hot and sticky. He knows it’s died even before his son’s hand lands on the button, not because there is no hope for Tubbo’s leadership, but because there is no hope for Wilbur. Phil sees it in his eyes. He knows Wilbur well, and he knows there is nothing he can do to save it. He tries anyway. 

“It’s not gone.” It won’t be, if only Wilbur lets it live. “You’ve just got it back.”

“It  _ is,  _ Phil.” The smile Wilbur wears is not his. “Everything I built it on sits in the dust. It’s gone. It’s dead.” 

Wilbur is the one who is dead. The darkness in his eyes, the darkness that threatens to seep out over the land, is hopeless and murky and deep. If Wilbur lets this eat him more than it already has, L’manberg will die with him. This Phil knows. 

The dam is breaking. Phil is too late to stop it. Wilbur slams his hand onto the button, and Philza screams, throwing himself forward and tackling his son to the ground, tenting his wings over them, giving in to the searing ice that tears through his feathers, looking back over his shoulder when the world goes numb to see the dust beginning to settle on the shattered corpse of L’manberg.

Fire is licking at the corners of every letter Wilbur has ever sent him, climbing up the edges of the chest back home, burning away at ink and hopes and dreams. 

“It was never meant to be,” Wilbur whispers.

* * *

Philza is vindictive and just, an angel bringing sweeping death upon a nation that’s fallen to decay. Rather than let the writhing, rotten form of L’manberg continue to fester, he looks on as one of his sons once again brings the country to ruin.

The sky is dark with the skeletal forms of withers, screaming, sparkling, crackling with agonized fury. The terrible grid of obsidian, web-like and dark, looms a shadowed expanse over the place the country once stood. It’s almost similar to the walls that once stood around its borders, a twisted mirror of the months-old threat.

Techno himself stands at the heart of the wreckage, tall and glimmering in enchanted netherite, silhouetted in the storm’s core. He cuts down anyone who approaches with perfect efficiency, screaming battered grievances to anyone who will listen: the president, the traitor, the wind.

Phil watches the ground tear itself to pieces. L’manberg uproots the stone of her heart, flinging viscera and debris out of place. The bombs he helped to craft fall in a monotone heartbeat, impassive and thrumming and constant. Each time he looks, the crater is deeper, a gaping, irreparable wound in the earth, filled with swampy shadows. 

Tommy is standing across the ruin from him. Phil catches sight of his lone figure in the flickering lamplight. He’s staring directly at Phil, naked hurt written across his pinched face. He can see the question, even from such a distance. 

_ Why? _ Tommy asks with furrowed brows and pleading eyes. 

Phil’s already asked himself the same question, perched atop Techno’s roof, swathed in the stars he can no longer reach. Why is this the path he’s chosen? What changed? What happened between the button’s fatal click and this day of reckoning? What changed the condemnation he held for one son to sand and gunpowder and a ready fuse for another? 

Phil wasn’t present for L’manberg’s creation, wasn’t there when its independence was declared, didn’t get to see the land of his son’s heart until it was already gone. Despite all of this, he was privy to Wilbur’s deepest thoughts. Out of everyone here, Phil probably knows L’manberg best, knows most closely what it was meant to be.

Wilbur could have saved it, could have held tight to his passion. There was a way beyond the strife as long as his heart was still beating. But as soon as Wilbur let go of L’manberg, as soon as he let himself die, L’manberg was gone. The longer its corpse remains, the more it rots.

Despite all of this, he doesn’t have an answer for Tommy, who still holds L’manberg’s spirit close.

Phil spreads his shattered wings against the lightning-lit wasteland. This is not the first country he has laid to waste. He stands over the place it once was and smiles, bitter and fragile.

“Farewell, L’manberg,” Phil says, and it feels like a dirge on his lips. “May you never rise from your ashes.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this, I've got one more fic written for this series that I'll probably post sometime in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that :)


End file.
